The world’s food

Feast or famine?

Prognostications for the next 20 years

THE world's population is forecast to reach 7.5 billion by 2020, and growing prosperity, especially in China, is fuelling a rising appetite for meat and cereals. Yet it is becoming harder to find new farmland, water is increasingly scarce and crop-yield growth is slowing. Already, 167m children are malnourished. Are hungry times ahead?

Not necessarily, according to a new study published by the International Food Policy Research Institute, a food-policy think-tank. The study projects food supply and demand, trade and prices from 1997 to 2020 for 36 countries and 16 commodities. If current trends hold, the report sees cereal consumption rising by more than 33% and meat consumption by 57%. But only 9% more land will be used for cereal production in the developing world, and the average annual growth in cereal yields worldwide will fall by more than a third compared with rates in the 1980s and 1990s. More trade between rich and poor countries would help, but not if subsidies and other “trade distortions” persist. Sub-Saharan Africa—battered by AIDS, civil war and political mismanagement—will have a hard time simply standing still.

Yet if developing countries were to increase their investment in factors that affect food security—from agricultural research to rural roads to education—by more than a third over present rates, to $802 billion between 1997 and 2020, then the study predicts that agricultural yields will rise, prices will fall and the number of malnourished children will tumble to 94m. A big if.